For my second book report, I decided to read Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business by the author Pat Flynn. While deciding on a book to build my report on, this one specifically stood out to me since I never really heard of the idea of superfans. At first, I wondered if it had anything to do with superheroes, but after learning about them I came to realize just how important having superfans is to brands. Not only that but having this easy-to-understand guide is important as well.
The book starts off with the author Pat explaining an interaction he had with his wife. Pat and his wife April were reminiscing on their high school years and on all the things they liked back then. In particular, Pat highlights how his wife had a certain love for the Backstreet Boys. Not only did she love them, but she was actually a superfan of them. A superfan is more than just the average fan. A superfan will buy anything that the person of brand they are a fan of promotes, they become hardcore ambassadors, invest time, money, and emotion. They keep these entities alive on social media too.
After analyzing this, Pat continued to investigate superfans and then created a pyramid of them on how to build superfans.
Part 1 of this book focuses on turning a casual audience to an active audience. I had a lot of key takeaways from this section. For starters, Pat explains that brands must know their audiences and say what they feel. In other words, reflect what audiences feel. Pat explains that brands can do this by finding conversations that occur online. You can do this through general searches and by using specific key words on the right social media platforms. Pat also writes that brands should share personal things online. In order to humanize your brand, share your own personal experiences. This is the concept of showing the person behind the brand.
Another advice that Pat gives is to give audiences a quick success. What he means by this is to create quick challenges or games that are easy to win to allow audiences to feel instant gratification or success. All of this can be done on social media or through email listings. It overall helps create an active audience.
The last advice that stood out to me from this part is what Pat calls "return every handshake". Pat explains that to create active audiences, you must reply to them when they comment. If someone gives you a praise or a positive comment, return the handshake by replying.
Part 2 of this book focused on turning the active audience then to a connected community. Pat explains that brands should ask audiences questions. After posting content asking audiences questions helps them bring insights to your brand and it helps them connected with other commenters. Pat also explains that to create a connected community, brands should let people have decisions. What Pat means by this is to ask people to contribute during the decision-making process. This gives audiences a sense of power and to feel like they are a part of the brand and the community in it.
Similar to the advice Pat gave in part 1, Pat explained here that brands should create fun and free challenges. An example of this was a free subscriber challenge trial. This then allows audiences to complete the challenges in community.
Another piece of advice that stood out to me here was to show human transparency. Pat advices brands to do this by showing their business process online. An example he gave was to create a video showing the business process or a simple day in work. Lastly, Pat also gives the advice to let your audience to meet up. Meeting up is an efficient way to build community, and especially because the audience will meet up for what they have in common, the brand.
Part 3 of this book focused on turning the connected community into finally superfans. My first key takeaway here was the advice Pat gave of sending unexpected messages. Brands can do this by sending personalized videos or messages to audiences in a personalized manner. This helps audiences and fans feel special and personally connected to the brand. Pat also advices to get the fans involved. In other words, allow for opportunities to either hire or get fans directly involved in the business. Lastly, my final key takeaway was to offer platinum access or a VIP experience. This was interesting to me because not many brands do this, but it seems like an interesting concept to implement.
Not only does Pat give advice on how to get superfans, but he also gives quick tips on how to prevent the negative side of this. Pat gave the advice of paying attention to all that you say, do, and post online. It is very true that as brands grow, so does the attention on them. Because of this, Pat also gives the advice that brands should plan properly for everything. This is the notion of plan for the best and prepare for the worst. In relation to his previous advice, Pat also gave the tip of not responding to everybody. As brands grow, more people comment online, and therefore it is challenging to reply to every single comment. Therefore, Pat gives the advice to hire a team to reply to people, or to reply to certain people with common questions or insights and then share them with the general audience. Last but not least, Pat gives the tip to not burn yourself out. To me this is truly the most important advice to listen to.
All in all, I really enjoyed and recommend this book. This book was generally very easy to read. The concepts are also easy to understand because Pat uses lots of real-world examples of his life and of many successful brands. Not only that, but the book is set up in a step-by-step layout or format. To me, I personally enjoy reading books in this formatting. Not only are they easy to understand through the easy to layout, but they are also easy to follow along yourself. If you want to try the advice yourself, you can follow each part easily. Overall, I do recommend this book to anyone looking for an easy-to-read book, for people looking to receive business advice, or for anyone studying brand audiences.
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